On 30th July 2019, a Chinese delegation led by the Deputy City Mayor as well as the Director of Alasan Economic Development Zone visited IEC to learn more about IEC’s R&D activities. Of particular interest are gasification technologies which are suitable for high ash coal, and the potential to integrate waste as a co-feedstock for chemical production. Following the meeting and a technical tour of IEC’s gasification pilot plants, the delegation also visited the Stadtreinigung Dresden to obtain an overview of modern waste separation and collection methods. A highlight of the visit is the introduction of the biological-mechanical facility using the Herhof process to produce refuse derived fuel (RDF) as co-feedstock for coal power plants.

"The new Freiberg branch is an example of the approach of taking a holistic look at the use of resources and implementing solutions with practical relevance in Freiberg. The cooperation with Fraunhofer will make it possible to increase the visibility of this research work internationally and to involve companies from Saxony and Germany that can benefit from the exploitation of these ideas. In this way, we generate added value in the region from science - building on and through the targeted expansion of local competencies," says Science Minister Dr. Stange.

At the same time, the Carbon Cycle Technologies branch strengthens the profile of the TU Bergakademie in the field of sustainable raw materials and energy management as well as the recycling of metallic and carbon resources. "We are the leading institute in Europe for research and development in the field of thermal-chemical conversion of primary and secondary carbon sources, in particular coal, natural gas and carbon-containing waste. This enables us to develop economic and sustainable solutions for pressing social issues," says Prof. Bernd Meyer, Director of the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC). In addition to the advantages for climate protection, he also has the problem of plastic waste in mind. Instead of polluting the landscape and the oceans, it could become a source of raw materials for the carbon cycle economy.

With new processes and technologies on an industrial scale, the researchers at the IEC of the TU Bergakademie and the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructures of Materials and Systems IMWS want to make it possible in future to use existing carbon sources as efficiently and as sparingly as possible in terms of CO2 emissions and resources. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, green hydrogen or biomass are also to be included.

In the course of the four-year construction phase, which has now been approved, equipment investments for the analysis of carbon carriers and their conversion products as well as pilot-scale test facilities are also planned. There, the different feedstocks will be tested under industrial conditions in different conversion concepts.

Partners from German and Polish industry and science as well as representatives from associations and politics were also present at the festive presentation of the permit. The waste management, energy and plant engineering sectors were particularly interested. To coincide with the establishment of the Fraunhofer IMWS branch office in Freiberg, a contract was signed between the TU Bergakademie Freiberg and JSW, Poland's largest coking coal producer in Europe, for a five-year research fund for the development of new sustainable value chains to close the carbon cycle for coke production by-products. The president of JSW, Daniel Ozon, came to Freiberg personally for this purpose.

From 11 to 13 March, ten high-level experts and specialists from diverse business units from SINOPEC visited the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC) at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. This visit builds on on-going exchanges between SINOPEC and IEC which was initiated in 2017 during the first visit by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Meyer and Dr. rer. pol. Roh Pin Lee to SINOPEC’s headquarters in Beijing.

SINOPEC is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical enterprise group which is established by the state in 1998. It is the largest oil and petrochemical product supplier and the second largest oil and gas producer in China, the largest refining company and the second largest chemical company in the world after BASF.

During this visit to Freiberg, SINOPEC and IEC had intensive discussions about a strategic collaboration in the field of gasification technologies to facilitate the transformation from a linear to circular carbon economy. A key result from the visit is the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) by both parties. Prof. Meyer emphasized. “The visit by SINOPEC is a recognition of IEC’s leading international role in R&D for carbon conversion technologies. The MoU builds a foundation for a new level of industry collaboration with our institute to bring IEC’s innovations onto the international market.”

The intensification of exchanges with SINOPEC is the result efforts to build up an international network to promote a transition in the chemical industry towards cleaner and sustainable production. Dr. Roh Pin Lee, head for technology assessment at IEC and research group leader of the BMBF-funded research STEEP-CarbonTrans” stated, “This represents a big step in internationalizing our national network for a circular carbon economy which was initiated together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure of Materials and Systems IMWSin January 2019 in Espenhain. Our goal is to bring together key actors from chemical, energy and waste sectors to jointly develop and implement solutions to address the carbon dilemma and the global waste crisis.”

During their visit, the Chinese guests were highly impressed with TU Bergakademie Freiberg’s rich history as the German resource university. TU-Rector Prof. Klaus-Dieter Barbknecht personally welcomed the Chinese guests and honored their visit with an entry in the university’s Honorary Book.

Following the meetings and technical tours of IEC’s extensive pilot plant facilities, SINOPEC also visited the Abfallwirtschaftsverband Chemnitz (AWVC) for a first-hand impression of how waste separation and feedstock preparation for combustion and gasification are carried out in a modern residual waste treatment plant.

85 years ago, a group of scientists developed an essential statistical distribution for particle collectives which was very important for the thermal engineering technology of the twentieth century: the Rosin Rammler Sperling Bennet distribution which is even named after the four researchers involved. The RRSB distribution plays an important role in the field of process technology until now, despite being better known as Weibull Distribution since the 1950s, which goes back to a Swedish scientist.

Especially Prof. Erich Rammler is well known in Freiberg as an important German scientist of the second half of the 20th century for the utilization of lignite. His working place, Leipziger Straße 28, a central building at the Campus, is even named after him. But also the scientist Paul Otto Rosin, who worked at the Bergakademie from 1914 until 1932, has never been forgotten, as a commemorative plaque, which was inaugurated in 2013, at the main entrance is demonstrating.

Graduated as an engineer for metallurgy at the Bergakademie Freiberg in 1914, Paul Otto Rosin, as one of the numerous important alumni and an outstanding German scientist, has a crucial position in the history of the Bergakademie. He has been a researcher of utmost importance in the field of pneumatic drying, coal firing and thermochemical process technology. As coal established as an efficient energy carrier in the 1920s, Rosin worked on the efficient and low-emission utilization of coal as a scarce resource.

Already by 1932, Paul Otto Rosin was internationally well established as a researcher, supported by his ties to the Institute of Fuel in London. After his expulsion of Germany, he worked at the Imperial College and at the Institute of Fuel. His achievements are important for teaching and research until today. He is not only one of the pioneers of the modern coal combustion technology, as founder of the most important statistical particle distribution, but also for the It-diagram of combustion calculation, jointly developed with the chemist Hermann Fehling, which is part of the academic teaching at universities until now.

Rammler and Rosin had a close personal relationship. Erich Rammler had not only been employed in Rosin’s laboratory for fuel technology and industrial thermal engineering technology in Dresden, they also often travelled together. In 1936, caused by the political developments and Rosin being from a jewish family, he sold his private institute to Rammler and emigrated to London in the same year. Fortunately, the emigration to London was a chance for Rosin expand his research to an international level and to start a business career.

Sebastian Nicholas Rosin has continued his father’s lifework as an entrepreneur and creative engineer in the business world. He lead entrained-flow drying to a breakthrough in the Anglosaxon market. Later on, he sold his company to GEA, today called Bar Rosin Gea. In 1980, he formed the Atritor Limited. The company is now leading in innovative industrial applications of the so calledDryer-Pulveriser (combined drying and pulverization unit). He introduced the audience to this business, together with his sales director, Andrew Rigg.

“The outstanding pioneer work which represents the Rosin-Rammler-Sperling-Bennet distribution should be equally a commitment and a challenge for us”, Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Barbknecht, rector of the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, said. “The requirements have changed, have become more complex. We are now at the beginning of the transition from a linear economy to the circular economy, the most urgent challenge of our century. To be successful, we need our resource university to have at least the same engineering spirit and creativity in these crucial areas of research as Paul Rosin, and later on his son Sebastian Rosin, have possessed.”

It is the third guest professorship since the establishment of the Institute of Clean Coal Technology (ICCT) in 1995. For many years, the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) and ICCT has been cooperating with the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. With the guest professorship, both universities are aiming to further deepen their cooperation especially in the field of circular carbon economy. Currently, both sides have a collaborative research project that is jointly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Chinese research organization National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

In the last ten years, China has pursued an unprecedented investment program to realize an import-independent chemical industry based on its own raw material sources. Coal chemistry plays a dominant role here. Increasingly, efforts are focusing on increasing feedstock flexibility for difficult and secondary carbon resources as well as achieving highest efficiency and environmental standards. To achieve these goals, Chinese politics, business, and science are establishing strategic cooperation with international experts and research organizations. In recent years, the Chair of Energy Process Engineering and Thermal Waste Treatment (EVT) at the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC), TU Bergakademie Freiberg has dynamically developed cooperation with China in this field.

ICCT is China's leading university institute for clean coal technologies. In less than 20 years, a new entrained-flow process for coal gasification was developed here. It is called the Opposite Multiple Burner (OMB) gasification. OMB has successfully penetrated the market and now holds the largest installed gasification capacity worldwide. IEC is honored to have such strong partners in the gasification sector as co-organizers for its 10th International Freiberg Conference on IGCC & XtL Technologies which will be taking place in the city of Shanghai in China in 2020 with the focus “Closing the Carbon Cycle”.

The combustion of waste and coal for electricity and heat generation not only leads to adverse environmental impacts, it also represents a waste of these valuable domestic carbon resources which could otherwise be used as raw materials for chemical production. The TU Bergakademie Freiberg – as the resource university – is called upon to develop solutions jointly with the industry to initiate a carbon transition i.e. to recycle and channel carbon resources back into the carbon cycle rather than simply combusting them at the end of their life cycle as in the dominant linear economy approach. To support the transformation from a linear to circular carbon economy, the Institute for Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC) at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg initiated the first Consortium for a Circular Carbon Economy (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kohlenstoffkreislaufwirtschaft – ARGE K2) in Germany. Forerunners are partners from North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), namely the leading companies RWE, INEOS and REMONDIS from the energy, chemical and waste management sectors respectively. Together with IEC as initiator and project coordinator, they form the ARGE K2-NRW.

The kick-off meeting of the ARGE K2-NRW took place on 19 September at the headquarters of REMONDIS in Lünen in the Ruhr region, where REMONDIS operates Europe’s largest center for industrial recycling. Over the next three years, scenarios for a circular carbon economy through the chemical utilization of residual waste – with and without integration of the chemical utilization of Rhenish lignite – will be developed. Project lead Dr. Roh Pin Lee, Head of the Technology Assessment Research Division at IEC and the STEEP-CarbonTrans Research Group funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) noted, “The ARGE K2-NRW is a first for the sector-coupling as it is not existent in this form so far. The coming together of the energy, chemical and waste management sectors opens the door to new intersectoral value chains for the sustainable utilization of carbon resources and facilitates holistic technology and impact assessment”.

In the ARGE K2-NRW, concepts will not only remain on paper. Concrete plans for the technical and logistical integration of circular carbon technologies will be developed for selected locations in NRW. Of particular interest to the industry is the innovative FlexiSlag technology for converting multiple carbon sources into synthesis gas. This technology was successfully demonstrated in May 2018 at IEC’s pilot plant in Freiberg with 100% waste feedstock. For the industry partners in ARGE K2-NRW, one of the most important questions is whether and under which conditions such sustainable circular carbon approaches could be economically feasible, and which risks are associated with their market implementation.

Further ARGE K2 consortiums are currently in preparation in the vicinity of large chemical sites in Germany. There is a great deal of interest in the transformation from a linear to circular carbon economy. The motivations include contribution to reducing the carbon footprint, addressing the global waste challenge as well as reducing the chemical industry’s one-sided dependency on imported fossil raw materials for their production.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Meyer, Director of the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC) from the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, has been awarded the accolade as Distinguished Scientist by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as part of its CAS President’s International Fellowship (PIFI) Program. This award recognizes international talents who are well established and internationally recognized scientists in their respective research fields, having obtained outstanding scientific accomplishment and prestigious international honors, awards or prizes. Every year, applications for the CAS international Fellowship Program for Distinguished Scientists is restricted at around 200 applicants. In 2018, 31 international experts from multiple disciplines from eleven countries are selected and recognized with this high-level distinction, out of which four are from Germany. Prof. Meyer is one of eight recipients of the CAS PIFI award for Distinguished Scientists in the field of engineering and information technology. With this award, distinguished scientists receive a 10-year China visa.

The CAS PIFI award honors Prof. Meyer’s expertise as a leading international expert in the field of gasification and his international engagement in promoting sustainable carbon utilization and the transformation from a linear to circular carbon economy. In his lecture tour at the CAS between 24-29 June 2018, Prof. Meyer held talks on the demands on conversion technologies for the sustainable utilization of primary and secondary carbon sources and presented on international R&D activities and developments in this area at two CAS institutes namely the Institute of Coal Chemistry (CAS ICC) and the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics (CAS IET). In addition to intensive discussions with CAS colleagues about opportunities for intensifying collaboration between Germany and China in the field of sustainable utilization of carbon resources, he also visited the extensive laboratory facilities and numerous pilot-plants of CAS to obtain a first-hand experience of their highly impressive R&D developments and associated industry applications.

Prof. Meyer is accompanied on the lecture tour to CAS by Dr. Roh Pin Lee who leads the technology assessment research division at IEC. Dr. Lee has been invited to give a talk at the CAS ICC as part of the Foreign Experts Program of the Shanxi Province. Her presentation shares research results from her junior research group STEEP-CarbonTrans funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), in particularly on the integration of social sciences into the early stages of technology R&D so as to facilitate effective scientific and technology communication and societal uptake of innovative technologies for the sustainable utilization of domestic carbon resources.

The transition to a circular carbon economy is the way to go in order to solve a seemingly unsolvable contradiction: Plastic is indispensable in our daily lives. However, it soon becomes trash and ends up in the waste incineration, or even worse, is discarded indiscriminately and pollutes the environment. Should we have a guilty conscience if we throw plastic packaging into the bin? Or must we do without many of our everyday products? No cotton buds or straws in the future, or recycle all drinking bottles as the EU demands?

Without question, plastic wastage must be stopped. However, abstinence and restrictions address only the symptoms but not the causes. This becomes clear when we look at the “waste mountains” in Asia and in our neighboring countries, not to mention the polluted lakes and oceans. The waste crisis cannot be solved by policy regulation alone. It demands a holistic approach. The missing key component lies in bringing non-recyclable waste back into the carbon system (i.e. circular carbon economy). And the potential is immense. Waste can then become a part of the raw material basis for new chemical products. This kills two birds with one stone. If waste is not burnt, there will be no associated emissions and therefore no CO2. At the same time, imported oil can be replaced and the use of domestic waste as raw material for our industry will increase their resource security.

How can we produce new raw materials from waste? The answer is provided by the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC) at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. With an innovative gasification technology, scientists, engineers and technicians from various disciplines have succeeded in producing synthesis gas from 100% waste. This synthesis gas can then be used as raw material for the production of a wide range of chemical products. In addition, IEC succeeded in converting all mineral and metallic impurities as well as non-organic components in the waste into a clean glassy residue. As pollutants are permanently encapsulated in this glassy granulate, its water neutrality allows it to be used as a mineral raw material. Furthermore, the metals in the residue can also be separated with magnets and eddy current and channeled back into the metallurgic cycle, thus contributing to the conservation of metal resources.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Meyer, institute director of IEC, presented this technology breakthrough for chemical waste recycling in his opening speech at the International Freiberg Conference on IGCC & XtL Technologies – the leading international conference for carbon conversion technologies to promote the transformation to a circular carbon economy – in Berlin on 04.06.2018.

The challenge now is to make this groundbreaking technology ready for market entry so that it can be used competitively by industry both in Germany and worldwide. The next step is the preparation for a broad economic application to support a holistic and sustainable solution to the global waste problem.

With its 9th edition, the International Freiberg Conference on IGCC & XtL Technologies once again proved itself to be the leading international conference in the field of chemical utilization of carbon resources (clean carbon conversion) with low CO2 emissions. During the opening ceremony, the conference hosted distinguished speakers namely Dr. Jadwiga Emilewicz (Minister of Entrepreneurship and Technology, Poland), Dr. Christian Ehler (Member of the European Parliament), Hans-Joachim Hennings (Department Head at the Ministry of Economy, Science and Digitization, State of Saxony-Anhalt), via video message Dr. Eva-Maria Stange (Minister for Higher Education, Research and the Fine Arts, State of Saxony), Dr. Lars Kulik (Executive Board Member of RWE Power AG) and Prof. Bernd Meyer (IEC, TU Bergakademie Freiberg).

During the conference, new scientific insights, progresses in low-emission, sustainable technologies, and the economic and industrial-scale implementation of carbon conversion technologies took center stage. A particular focus was also on the systemic and holistic investigation of the sustainability of emerging carbon conversion technologies and the public acceptance of the diverse development steps associated with the transformation from a linear to circular carbon economy, with the goal of closing the carbon cycle through integration of renewable energy.

Regional-specific characteristics are observed with regards to the chemical utilization of primary and secondary carbon sources. In Asia, and especially in China, developments are occurring at a breathtaking pace towards modern and large-scale coal-based technologies. For example in 2017, the world's largest coal-based Fischer-Tropsch plant with an annual production of 4 Mio. tons products went into operation in Ningxia (China). In contrast, developments in Europe are primarily focused on research and demonstration-scale, in particularly for decentralized Power-to-X solutions. Furthermore, increasing global interest in the use of alternative carbon sources such as waste, biomass and CO2 for chemical production can be identified.

The majority of the 287 participants from 22 countries came from Germany and China. Of the 140 oral presentations, the presentation by Florian Keller (IEC, TU Bergakademie Freiberg) on ​​"Technological and Environmental Evaluation of the Production of Organic Platform Chemicals from Different Feedstock" was voted best scientific presentation while the best application presentation went to Tobias Ginsberg (RWE Power AG) for his presentation on "Gasification of sewage sludge in the Freiberg COORVED lab scale unit for in-situ recovery of phosphorus". For the first time, the conference included a special poster reception which gave young scientists the opportunity to present and discuss their results. The highly successful Krüger Poster Reception was kindly sponsored by Dr. Erika Krüger from the Association of Friends and Supporters of the TU Bergakademie (Verein der Freunde und Förderer der TU Bergakademie Freiberg e.V.) and Chairman of the Krüger Foundation. Dr. Erika Krüger also opened the reception and presented the awards for best posters personally.

The conference concluded with four technical tours to companies from various sectors in the carbon economy in and around Berlin. The 10th International Freiberg Conference on IGXX & XtL Technologies will be taking place in Shanghai (China) in June 2020. The upcoming conference will be co-organized with IEC's long-time Chinese collaborators from science and industry namely the East China University of Science and Technology (Shanghai) and Synfuels China Technology Co., Ltd. (Beijing).

Synfuels China has more than 1 000 employees and is the technology provider for the world’s largest coal-based FT plant in Ningxia, China, which has an annual capacity of 4 million tons of FT products. In his talk on “Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis Fundamentals & Engineering Practices”, Prof. Li presented the progress of Synfuels China in this field and shared insights obtained through numerous major industry applications.

Besides his extensive industry experiences, Prof. Li also possesses an outstanding academic vita. His scientific accomplishments are reflected by the more than 200 publications, over 60 patents, and a software-package for FT synthesis. His achievements have also been honored through several science and innovation awards.

From 1999 to 2000, Prof. Li was a Humboldt scholar at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Since then, he has maintained close scientific contact with research institutes in Germany which is reflected in Synfuels China’s long-term R&D collaboration with the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC) at TU Bergakademie Freiberg in the field of carbon conversion and syngas production. Synfuels China was also the co-organizer of the 2015 International Freiberg Conference on IGCC & XtL Technologies in Hohhot, China with IEC. Thus, the TU Bergakademie Freiberg is honored to have a renowned and leading scientist and industry leader such as Prof. Li as speaker at the Lomonossow Dialogue.

The event on 29th May 2018 was attended by invited international experts and industry leaders as well as German scholars from TU Bergakademie Freiberg in the fields of natural sciences and engineering. Once again, the Lomonossow Dialogue has provided a platform for intense exchanges at the highest scientific level.

At the end of his visit, Prof. Dr. Yong Wang Li met with the Rector of Freiberger University, Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Barbknecht.

In addition to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, urgent tasks for politics, industry and society are the reduction in the demand for primary resources and the increased utilization of secondary resources so as to pave the road towards a circular economy.

The transition towards the sustainable utilization of domestic primary and secondary carbon sources – these include carbon-containing waste (e.g. plastic and ocean waste) and lignite in Germany – is the focus of the R&D activities at the Institute of Energy Process Engineering and Chemical Engineering (IEC) at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. In addition to public-funded projects by federal and state governments, IEC works together with major national and international industrial partners to advance innovations and developments in this area.

The Saxon Ministry of Science and the Arts has also funded a research project on low-carbon coal chemistry and chemical recycling as a contribution to a sustainable and low-emission circular economy in Saxony and its neighboring regions. During the visit on 16 May 2018, Prof. Bernd Meyer – institute director of IEC – informed Minister Stange about the R&D activities at IEC to promote a circular carbon economy, the relevance of the topic nationally and internationally as well as the development plans for an innovation center for circular carbon cycle technologies in cooperation with Fraunhofer.

Dr. Alexander Laugwitz, responsible for the technology development for chemical carbon utilization – explained about the potential in using currently combusted waste in Germany for chemical production and the demands on gasification technologies to achieve this goal. During the conversation, Dr. Roh Pin Lee – Head of Technology Assessment Division at IEC – also updated the Minister on the interdisciplinary activities at IEC to support the transformation from a linear to a circular carbon economy e.g. activities carried out within the junior research group “STEEP-CarbonTrans” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

During the visit, the Minister also had the opportunity to view the large-scale test facilities at IEC as well as original ocean waste materials (provided by the Nature and Biodiversity Conversation Union NABU for R&D purposes) first hand.